Third, it develops a discourse and visual analysis of Kesari’s trailer as a communicative object. Attention is paid to the peculiarities of contemporary trailers published on user-generated content platforms like YouTube. Second, it theorises the trailer as a communicative object whose aim is to sell not only a commercial entertainment product (the movie) but also the specific worldview embedded into it.
First, it offers a background on the movie Kesari and a historical context of the Battle of Saragarhi.
In so doing, it is relevant to the debate on South Asian popular culture, since its cinematic products are often used as vehicles for ideologies, first and foremost nationalistic ones. On the other hand, using Kesari’s as a case study, the paper aims at contributing towards the theorisation of the trailer as a communicative object. On the one hand, it discusses the narrative within which this specific trailer frames the history it represents, its positioning vis-à-vis ideas of Sikh martiality, Islamophobia, colonialism, and Indian nationalism. This paper proposes a discourse and visual analysis of the trailer of a recent (March 2019) blockbuster Hindi movie, Kesari, based on a historical event known as ‘the Battle of Saragarhi’ (1897). Yet trailers are communicative objects with own aims, mechanisms, and peculiarities whose relevance and complexity are growing along with the evolution of mass and social media. Trailers have received comparatively less attention. Popular culture, movies in particular, have been receiving increasing scholarly attention beyond the field of cultural and film studies and rightly so, as movies represent political texts that can work as tools for intervention, debate, ideology glorification or denunciation.